Refuse to change any other part of your business. Treating design as an add-on can work when a company commissions a “designer series” of products to briefly boost the brand’s appeal, but this is hardly what we mean when we talk about innovation saving your business. The smartest companies foster an internal culture of innovation, which creative consultants can support, but only if other aspects of the business — management, development, manufacturing, marketing — are open to change. More immediately, requiring a design team to propose only solutions that can be realized with your current process ensures more of the same.

Design outside of your innovation space. Designers don’t implement solutions, companies do. For that reason, the most innovative solution on earth won’t work if it’s pursued by a company that can’t properly execute it. At Ziba we call this capability the client’s “innovation space” — the arena in which they’ve already proven themselves willing and able to lead the pack. Some companies are technology innovators, others are product innovators or experience innovators. Learning which you are in order to direct later efforts is a crucial first step that most companies skip.

Try to design for everybody. Design works as a differentiator because it responds to human needs, both functional and emotional. Most of us agree that a Ferrari is beautifully designed, but nobody would say it’s for everyone. The same could be true of a minivan. Each succeeds in its market because it delivers to a tightly defined group of users. In a landscape where consumers increasingly demand tailored experiences, failing to identify a clear strategic target is designing to fail. The most useful tool a client can give a consultancy is a well-considered, focused profile of who they’re designing for. The least useful is a mandate to create something that appeals to everyone.

Insist on replicating another company’s success. “We want to be the Apple of [insert industry]” might be the single most common request clients make of creative consultancies, and it’s certainly one of the most damaging. Good design does more than just serve the needs of its audience, it does so in a way that’s true to the company’s purpose and values. An Apple-like experience delivered by a company that isn’t Apple can’t be sustained, because it’s not backed up by Apple’s culture and resources. The result is an inconsistent experience that feels disingenuous to customers, and shatters their loyalty. This is why “me too” innovation almost never works. Not only does it make you look like a copycat, it shows you don’t care about your own brand enough to express it in your user experience.

Compartmentalize design into isolated tasks. It’s tempting to treat design as a menu of services, applying it here and there on bits of a project that need sprucing up. To a skeptical client this can feel economical and controlled, but it cripples the design effort by fragmentation. The best user experiences are integrative; they make sure that every touch point is consistent and logical, building trust from the user, and reinforcing the brand’s character. Piecemeal design work creates an incoherent experience that users will ultimately reject.